The palm-of-your-hand soap operas turning viewers away from TV

11 hours ago 5

The plots are threadbare, the dramatic tension is strung out and the suds are piled on. Welcome to The Double Life of my Billionaire Husband, the latest in a near-avalanche of so-called “vertical video” dramas.

Shot for a mobile-phone friendly format, these are palm-of-your-hand English-language telenovelas, big on shocking revelations, dramatic twists and long-lost relatives, with borderline-parody titles like Trapped In The Boss’s Embrace, The Shy Beauty and the Billionaire Beast and If Only You Loved Me More.

Big studios are moving into the vertical video soap drama market.

At last month’s Mipcom television market in Cannes, in the south of France, the emergence of vertical video dramas was the talk of the market. Seemingly born out of low-budget soaps from Korea, Europe and Latin America, they have become a $US8 billion ($12.2 billion) market globally, doubling in value every year.

But what is interesting about that sizeable pie is that it largely excludes traditional Hollywood studios, though that is likely to change as the US industry realises the potentially deep well of revenue in the new format and clamours on board.

Can true love prevail? Brace Face Betty, one of My Drama’s most popular vertical video dramas.

The market is currently dominated by phone apps such as My Drama (headquartered in Ukraine), Drama Shorts (Poland), DramaBox and Good Short (Singapore), Shortmax (China) and US-based Reel Short, all of which sell libraries of phone soaps in two- to three-minute episodes.

Typically, the first block of episodes are offered for free, to hook audiences. The remainder are offered for about $1.50 an episode. Some apps also offer annual memberships. Other micro-studios, such as Dhar Mann, produce similarly scripted free content, but using a business model built on ad revenue and brand partnerships.

Some big studios, like Fox, are getting in on the game, and looking beyond hip-pocket soaps to explore the format’s potential in the unscripted realm. And Hollywood’s powerful actors union SAG-AFTRA has just moved to lock a new “verticals” agreement for productions with budgets under $460,000 shot on the vertical format.

Fox Entertainment chief executive Rob Wade says the development of portable production technology has shifted the economics of fast production, allowing vertical video series to be shot on smaller budgets than blue-chip streaming dramas, for example.

“There’s a misunderstanding of how much it actually costs to make TV shows,” Wade says. “You’re talking about an hour and a half, 90 minutes of content [in total], right? You can shoot that in five or six days, you have a small cast of actors, it’s not that expensive.”

The genre sprang out of TikTok’s Chinese market where short dramas are known as “duanjus”. These lean into soap staples: someone in trouble, boy-meets-girl (or boy), rags-to-riches, declining fortunes and good news/bad news. Sold as chapters of a storyline-as-self-contained-movie, they punch hard with emotionally charged twists, such as betrayal and revenge.

At Mipcom, where more than 10,000 industry delegates from around the world were combing the corridors of the Palais des Festivals in Cannes looking for the “next big thing”, the next big thing was relatively small compared to the $7.5 million-plus-per-hour TV dramas that dominate screens.

And there’s oil in that there fertile ground: according to Ukraine-based producer Holywater, a single hit title counts its revenue in tens of millions against a production cost of less than $460,000. Under a deal between Holywater and Fox Entertainment, Fox will produce more than 200 vertical titles in the next two years.

Moriah Moss and Jesse Morales in a scene from Queen of the Court.

Wade believes there is also rich potential in reality TV, whose shows are already clipped in high rotation on social media, with potential new vertical series spun-off blue chip franchises such as American Idol or The Bachelor.

Fernando Szew, president of Fox Entertainment Studios, and Julian Franco, president of operations and strategy for Fox Entertainment, are already working on a spin-off to the Gordon Ramsay series Next Level Chef, titled Next Level Kitchen. “When you think about how might that brand come to life in vertical ... I think there are many opportunities,” Franco says.

Wade does not see the rise of vertical as an “either/or” proposition. “I just see entertainment as entertainment,” he says. “You have to think, what is going to happen with AI across the globe in the next 20 years? Will that free up more time for people to entertain themselves?”

“This is another opportunity to engage and enjoy storytelling,” Wade says. “It wasn’t like we didn’t have anything [before social media], but then social media came, and then we’re enjoying that.”

While vertical video is competing for eyeballs, Wade does not believe it will detract from the fully realised experience of watching a movie.

“The phone is an important part of entertainment, but equally, cinema is [too]. If you have great IP, or great storytelling instincts or great relationships with creators, or all of those things, using this abundance of distribution methods is exciting.”

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